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What can words do for grief? The Intimate Story of Justin Ogier

In Believe it, the intimate account of her mother Mariel de Sarnes’s grief, Justin Augier reveals her unwavering confidence in her writing. Life force, literature changes us and transforms the world. He pushes boundaries, encourages new ways of being and looking. Meeting.

How do literature and engagement feed each other? How can books and their words support, help, build a possible path? In Believe me. on the powers of literature, Justin Augier describes the illness and loss of his mother, Mariel de Sarnays, a politician and centrist* figure who died at the age of 69 in January 2021 from overwhelming cancer. And develops a reflection that is both intimate and political about what words and writing can do for oneself, for others, for the world. Infusing his text with multiple quotations that create reverberating effects, he thus lays claim to welcome literature, “hospitable,” says writer Mahmoud Darwish, and essentially composite; with a personal narrative that illuminates his relationship with his mother as well as the literary education he has. derived from it, mixes the insights of Syrian intellectuals and the history of the blood-swept revolution, Justin Ogier, who also went through years of humanitarian commitments. Comments gathered around travel and extraordinary love.

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Daughter, mother and fat

“When I was a citizen, I wanted to write a book about the power of literature, in this way it makes every reader a resisting potential. It seems to me that I am resisting the spirit of the times, which is characterized by various defeats; crushing time with a constant thirst for immediacy, where everything must be grasped very quickly and forgotten just as quickly; in the crushing of identities, everyone is often labeled themselves; crushing of opportunities, language, finally. This desire to write, which had somewhat faded, returned when my mother told me when she was going to die, but did not know that I should write this text. As soon as he died, his sentence came back to me and resonated like a command from which I could no longer escape… It also became another book where my mother invited herself that I had a feeling: writing in his presence, as if he had appointed me after death. Writing was a way to perpetuate our relationship and to review it, to discover that it remained.

When the personal and the political collide

“This topic, which became close to my mother’s disappearance, was political from the beginning. I wanted to mention the documentary work I discovered in the context of the Syrian conflict, the work of Razan Zeitoune, a lawyer very present during the revolution, who was kidnapped by an Islamist group in 2013. Part of his job was documentation. death, so that the missing will not remain. The absence of historicity in Syria was organized by the regime, one of whose slogans was “Assad for eternity”, that is, a desire to forget combined with the madness of the eternal. One of the first things the revolutionaries did was turn back time. But Razan, in carrying out this work, simultaneously invented a new Syria, as if dialogue with ghosts made the future possible. In one of his last texts, he thus has this very powerful image of a road that opens up, paved with the corpses of friends of the revolution… To wake up Syria, to talk about literature and its powers, was one thing for me. a mirror that has survived to our time.

Literature is responsible for unfulfilled dreams, it must catch them and try to keep them alive; this is how it can encourage action, commitment. Then this revolution maintained a very strong relationship with language. Syria was under the yoke of a dictatorship where every sentence uttered ended up as a lie. It was a terrible nightmare from which the Syrians emerged, particularly through a magnificent retooling of the language. They began to detail the events, through this documentary work that I mentioned, but they also invented a game language to play with power, a performance language in demonstrations, and Syrian literature was transformed by the revolution; before it was followed by the first crushing, then the second by world indifference, the abandonment of the values ​​that Western democracies claimed to embody, and for which Syrians took to the streets where they were abandoned…”.

I don’t think that books can cause a revolution, but they walk inside us, work on us, sit and initiate slow transformations.

Justin Augier

Tell the truth in all its complexity

“Most of the time we are dealing with a language that is powerless to tell the reality, therefore to unite to change it. and the writer has a responsibility in this matter. From my point of view, he needs to regain the ability to tell reality in all its complexity, be it fiction or non-fiction. It should restore the ability to believe in the power of speech. Svetlana Alexievich, with whom I discovered The plea (a born writer Ukraine was raised in Belarus, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, whose literary project was to be the subjective and underground archive of modern Russia, published in 2015. The plea testimony of the world after Chernobyl, editor’s note), fascinated me with his invention of language, the voices and testimonies he gathers to tell the story of a nuclear accident that no one seemed to be able to talk about. He talks about radioactivity and its effects on the body, nature, beings. all that he managed to understand while admitting that he had this crazy idea while writing that his books could change something in the world; to believe I don’t think that books can provoke a revolution, but they walk among us, work on us, sit down and initiate slow transformations. Their sentences can change what is through those who read them…”.

The murdered community

“Grieving is a very difficult experience, but also very intelligent, and reading mourning diary by Roland Barthes, or The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, gave me the feeling of entering a community, a community of mourners. Perhaps these books gave me a horizon of meaning, the idea that these authors went through this ordeal and came back to commit it to paper. They gave me words and a foundation when I felt overwhelmed, as well as a form of comfort. I spent part of my life trying not to be identified as a “daughter”, which was one of the reasons I moved abroad for fifteen years (especially for humanitarian missions Ed.). As a young adult, I even harbored the illusion of erasing this biographical data. Telling the story of my mother’s journey became more important after that. It was that he was a cousin of the people I was looking for; these people who were driven by the belief that they could make a difference in reality, believing in the power of words and trying to make holes in the darkness; he belonged to the people. same family of spirits.”

* MP, Acting Minister for European Affairs in 2017 and alter ego of MoDem President François Bayrou for over forty years.

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Source: Le Figaro

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